my boring life story

Pat’s gone. I was out driving yesterday and a text came across from Elizabeth. I glanced and saw the word “beautiful” in the notification and thought, Here we go. He’s gone. I read the full message later and I was right. She seems to imply he saw the sunset, at least, but if he didn’t he still had family and doggos around him and got to die at home. Sounds pretty good to me.

I do not know what’s going to happen from here. I’m assuming that since there’s a little over a month left on the lease, she’ll honor that but the way this year has gone so far, and my life in general really, it seems like keeping one’s word is optional anymore. Probably always was and I was just a bit too trusting.

I didn’t reply. I’ll be surprised if she even remembers she’s got me on that texting group. I might send a sympathy note tomorrow since she said she was going to be out of the loop until Sunday, but probably not. There has been a lot of implied or borderline promising or offering going on that never follows through.

For instance. The mail key which I was given in late June or early July. I had tried it then and couldn’t get into the mailbox for some reason. That was right before I fell on my nose, and that accident was just weird — I sometimes wonder if I had some sort of mental lapse that night — so I’ve waffled between telling her she gave me the wrong key and just going and trying it again because maybe I did something wrong and brain no wurky so I hadn’t realized it at the time. Nope. I tried it again tonight. I didn’t do anything wrong. It won’t go into the keyhole either way up. At all. I had a few somewhat important things sent to me and now I have no idea what happened to them. I can’t believe the mailbox would hold that much mail.

I probably had better say something before the 31st gets here. I’m still at a point of relative leverage. If I end up late on the rent she could start playing games and I’d have no ground to stand on. The only reason I haven’t already is because of the electric bill issue. And she could still play games based on that.

I am quite positive a lot of this was stress around Pat’s illness. Doesn’t matter as much as it should; my needs are not going to wait until she decides to quit holding my life hostage, and this is not the first time she has. I should be more sympathetic and caring than I am, which I am pretty much not at all. In my experience, nobody actually wants me to care about them; they want ego strokes. I don’t give a fuck about egos and I’m no one’s fucking fluffer so that’s just not gonna happen. I’m burnt out. I tried. I got nothing but my efforts ignored or thrown back in my face. And now that I’ve had to deal with crazy people one too many times, the signs are very noticeable to me now so when I start picking that up on the radar I get reeeeeal skittish. It is what it is. Moving on now.

Eh. I should just get a P.O. box and get it over with. And what’s held me up on that was not being sure where to rent it. I kind of want to go back to Clintonville and get one there. If the same lady is working there who was there the whole time I lived with Matt, she’d shit to see me again. Haha. But get the box, get my PayPal card re-issued since I’m probably never going to even see the other one, and then the only other thing I really need to worry about is the BMV address-change card and maybe I can go in and get that done directly. I need to re-up my license and registration anyway, and had probably better do those in person. This next little while’s going to be interesting.

(At least I know the registration will be under $100. Thank fuck. Wonder if I can also get it and my license done early.)

The last several days have been interesting with the driving. Solid $100-plus days. Today it was going up by Alum Creek Lake again. Hadn’t done that in a while. The fall colors are absolutely lovely, and I wish I had a decent camera. If I weren’t in a mad rush to solve my immediate housing-related crisis, I’d go up there with my film SLR and take phone photos as backup in case my film’s too old. Oh well. Maybe I’ll still be alive and in Ohio next year and maybe I won’t.

I mean to do more stuff here soon on a couple Pages I’ve left idle. I’m kind of scattered at the moment. Got all sorts of backlog in multiple areas of my life. I should do more of that and less fucking around on social media. There’s too much silence. I need chatter. Not the TV. I don’t know what the fuck happened to television but it’s just gross now.

Okay. Bed.

Up til now with Uber Eats, I’ve tried doing their CVS shops a time or three but was never very happy with them because at that point the shop and pay functionality in stores was not that great: if I needed to substitute an item, it was worth my life to get hold of the customer and ask them what they wanted. It already took me longer than a restaurant delivery did, so this was very annoying.

So for a long time I would get these offers for shop-and-pays, and other than a couple restaurants where it was order and pay, I’d turn them all down.

Well, this week so far it’s been shit. Today I was feeling kind of desperate so when I got a decent-looking Target call, I thought, eh, fuck it. I’ll go see how this goes and if I like it, I guess I can do more of these.

SEVEN HOURS LATER

Okay… what was it. Two Target runs, two Meijer runs? Yeah. That was it. Four different locations, mind you. Three of them I’d been to before. The fourth was in the Westerville-Polaris area and holy shit, that’s the nicest Meijer I’ve ever been to. Out of all four runs, I only had to sub one item. The Graceland Target was absolutely-no-shit out of fresh raspberries of any type or category. I got the customer strawberries instead because she listed that as an acceptable substitution — hallelujah.

It was kind of difficult being in that area of town, but not as difficult as it used to be. But I can’t go to the Graceland Target without seeing those stupid giant red balls out front and thinking, Thea used to yell “Ball!” from her stroller when we’d go there and roll past them.

And then she grew up.

I can’t believe that was from the same year I left. Four months before. So much changed in so little time.

Today I also went past the hospital where she was born and the church where she used to have her belt tests for her martial arts school. Not on purpose. That was just where the app sent me.

Memories everywhere. I told myself, these are all mine now. If everyone else wants to throw them away in the name of pretending to be someone or something they’re not, I guess that is their problem, but this was my life. It still is. I am the memory-keeper when everyone else walks away.

Not the first time I’ve found myself in that position, either.

Probably won’t be the last.

I’ve also been thinking over the whole situation with Dad. I’ve felt guilty about it — shouldn’t I be looking after him? Not that guilty though. Who the fuck was looking after me when my brother was beating the shit out of me and my stepmom was fucking nuts? No one. I was on my own and if I wasn’t perfect I got my ass beat by people who could not be fucking bothered any of the rest of the time. I will admit, Dad’s been a great rescuer when I really, really needed him. The thing is, I’ve tried to make that happen as little as humanly possible, and sooner or later I always left because it’s fucking impossible to make a go of things down there unless you’re oil industry or you got a man. I couldn’t make a go of it with the oil industry, don’t want to anyway, and… well… we know me and men. That’s a dead end. And what’s Dad do when I’m down there? Bitches about everything I do. I’d say I’m sorry, but I’m fucking not: If you cannot have enough respect for me to trust me to figure my own life out at the age of almost half a century, you don’t get my help. Fuck off. I did not tell my father to quit his fucking drinking and neglecting his blood sugar when he was half a century old. I like to think I’ve got more class than that.

I’m probably wrong, but I like to think so, anyway.

Besides, the car wouldn’t make it down there. I suppose I could try, and then I could find myself fucking stranded because it is just not going to fucking happen. Even if it did, it’d die once I was down there. What would I do? Not be able to so much as grocery-shop. Right now, right this minute, if my car were to die I could still go get food until my money runs out, because it’s a bit of a walk but there are two grocery stores about equal distance from this apartment in opposite directions. I’d manage. If it happened at Dad’s, I’d half kill myself getting into Iota — shit you not, there’s a dead man’s curve between the trailer park and the town and no fucking sidewalk and no one knows what the fuck a speed limit is — and we will not even discuss Crowley or Jennings. If I were twenty years younger and an athlete. And had a bicycle. No. It’s not fucking happening.

“Dad could buy you another car” Dad ain’t buying me shit. Dad could have bought me a goddamn car when I was down there with Thea 18 years ago needing to get places with her. Mom almost gave me a van, and then changed her mind without telling me and simply came over to Dad’s and took it back. That’s my parents for you. Wrap themselves up in their own fucking egos, never mind what I need.

When I think how so many of my problems started with my parents not teaching me to fucking drive because I didn’t say the magic words first… It still enrages me.

The extended fam will talk shit about me for not fucking bothering. What the fuck ever. They’ve been talking shit about me my entire life, and before they talked shit about me they talked shit about my mom, and all that ruined my life. All well and good to get me away from Mom if even half of what I’ve heard is true, but they also got me away from my entire extended family, both sides, and I was stuck out there in strange lands with no one I knew. And I never got to know my family. And I’ve never belonged anywhere. It’s as if I died. I have been this little lost ghost all my life. Keep talking. I stopped caring a long damn time ago. God… I sent out holiday cards in the 1994 season? I think I heard back from one person. Aunt Diane. My aunt by marriage. And then she DIED. “Why don’t you write? Is your hand broken?” my actual blood relatives say, but when I did write, they couldn’t be arsed. Message fucking received.

Well, Mom bothers, but I can’t even read her writing anymore, and when I could, half the time I couldn’t make sense of it.

…

Getting back to the delivery thing. Had a good run today. Have grave doubts I’ll have the full $1000 by the end of the month. There are three things I can sell with a pretty good shot at the sales happening quickly. That’ll help. Other than that? If I keep having dead days like I’ve been doing, I really don’t know.

Either I’ll have enough for the last month’s rent or I’ll have enough for a storage locker and a room. (The storage locker is to hopefully keep bed bugs out of my stuff should I encounter that little problem again.) One way or the other I’ll have a roof over me. We’ll see.

P.S. That temp place I mentioned earlier this week, I never heard back about the background check. I have apparently been added to their “talent community,” which I am pretty sure means “you ain’t shit, but we’ll keep you dangling in case we get desperate.” I have a few other tires to kick. Gotta do that quickly so I’m getting paid by the time I’m in a room, if that’s the direction we’re headed. I’m so tired.

Yesterday Carrie messaged me to let me know Dad had been released home. No word on whether he’s considering going to the veterans’ retirement home but really, he should. Even if I were there, if we had another emergency like he had in Carrie’s SUV, it would take a while for the ambulance to get there. He isn’t safe. I can’t tell him that, of course, because he’s a jackass. Has always been, will always be, alleluia, amen. I can’t do anything about it. So he’s there in that little trailer and who knows what the fuck’s going to happen next.

This season of my life seems to be all about learning to let go of things I can’t change. I don’t know if this is normal for middle-aged people, but it’s a bit annoying. But also, I don’t have the “juice” I had thirty years ago and cannot be arsed working up a rage about it. I think I used all that up navigating the situation when Matt went loony on me two years ago*. Or most of it; I’ve had rage episodes since but they’ve been much weaker and shorter, thank fuck. That isn’t any more fun for me than it is for the people who have to hear it. I would just as soon have never experienced it at all. And I hate that my daughter remembers me like that. But it seems to be spent, too. Hopefully it never comes back.

I’ve been having a bad time with the delivery stuff the past few days when I’ve bothered at all, so now I’m in a mode of not wanting to go out and try. I don’t like this about myself, but Tuesdays are not busy anyway. I’ll try tomorrow. Hopefully I will be able to start early. My brain got all screwed up after yesterday and not having had adequate sleep Sunday night.

I went in to that temp agency yesterday and did all the onboarding stuff. We’re waiting on my background check now, supposedly. Usually they’re pretty quick in my experience but if they have a lot of people to process, who knows how long it’ll take. I didn’t ask. I probably should have. There are three shifts available: weekday days, weekday evenings, and weekend evenings. I was hoping for 40 hours a week and it wouldn’t hurt my feelings at all to have three days off (I would — these are ten-hour shifts), but if they give me weekends I won’t be totally sorry. Starting in a distribution center is a huge adjustment. My feet will be killing me for probably the first couple weeks. I could still deliver during the week, too. We’ll see.

It was weird being in that area of town again, too. It was familiar, because I used to go there all the time for pickups and deliveries when I lived in Whitehall, but it also kind of messed with my head how I started out being in southeast Columbus, and then I wound up in far north Columbus and in Delaware, and then I was in Marysville, and then I wound up in Dublin. All in less than a year. It’s been surreal. If I told most people I’ve known in this town the name of the road I am living on right now, they wouldn’t believe me. It’s special circumstances, but I barely believe it myself. This’ll never happen again. I should make sure to get photos before I leave.

I finally heard back from Molly, my Salvation Army veteran-rehousing caseworker, yesterday. Took her five fucking days to answer me and this is the first I’ve heard from her since July. Yes, I’ve been discharged from the program. No one told me it would happen nor under what circumstances. I remember signing a document saying I could be exited for not participating, but no one told me what participation meant, either. It’s POSSIBLE Elizabeth told her I’d quit my job, but she didn’t say and I won’t ask (and I think it rather unlikely, considering getting Elizabeth to sign documents in the beginning was like pulling teeth and now we’re going through the same song and dance with the electric bill). I will say Molly’s a fucking ditz and I don’t know who’s running that office — well, okay, I sort of do, I met her — but I say it’s mismanaged top to bottom. Shit communication. Shit followup. The only reason I even have this apartment was I set up an ad on craigslist. It’s a whole long story I won’t get into here, but it wasn’t a fun experience and I hope I never have to ask for that sort of “help” again. So I’m not going to go complaining to her boss, because what would be the point. It isn’t going to actually change anything.

You’re going “but it was a rehousing program and you’re housed now.” That wasn’t the only element. They’re supposed to be there to help for a little while afterwards in case you are at risk of losing your housing again. Like, if I were still in, I could explain the job situation to her and see if I could get a little help with the last month’s rent. That door’s closed now. I am not going to try to reopen it. I’m in the wrong county now, anyway.

And another thing. I cannot be the only sometime-homeless person who has noticed that when people label you Homeless, they treat you like some weird kind of zoo animal. This turns up in all sorts of interactions. I don’t mind talking about my experience and I wouldn’t mind telling people in my face-to-face life that I’ve been through it but I don’t trust them to be rational and just treat me like an adult human being who went through an unfortunate experience. I don’t think most of them know how. So it isn’t shame, because this shit could happen to anyone and certainly isn’t a mark of merit or the lack thereof. It’s not wanting to deal with the prejudicial bullshit. I only have so many psychological spoons and I can’t spare them for nonsense anymore.

The remarks I see on social media about homeless people, alone. I’ve had to pull up some people on my Facebook friends list like, “ahem, I never acted like that, thank you.” The absolute fucking cheek.

I’ve been making jewelry. I need to then take the next step and list it on Etsy, and I need to figure out shipping in the unlikely event any of it sells, and I’m about to run out of elastic for stretch bracelets, but I’ve gotten off to a decent start. I am trying to do more using up what I already have than adding in more beads. I was going to just sell the beads as supplies, but if I can get more for finished items, that would make more sense from a fiscal point of view. Also, I just need to do things with my hands again. I spend too much time on here ruminating and it’s not good for me.

Though it’s a catch-22 because I also write, shitty as it is, and I need to organize my photos, which have been 99% digital since 2004, and I need to organize other things so that when I need certain information or certain files I can actually find them. Could stand to empty out most of my Gmail, too. It’s gotten ridiculous. But I maybe need to schedule all this shit so I don’t get sucked into time-wasters. I dunno.

Would you believe I have a flat-screen TV in this apartment and I’ve never once turned it on? Jesus, I could be Making Things and also binging Game of Thrones again. I’m so fucking lame. Oh well.

It’s not my television. Or I don’t think it is. It was left here, and I got sort of an idea Elizabeth was willing to just give it to me but… nah. I’m not going to be taking anything out of here that I didn’t bring in here except possibly the Brita pitcher. I’m still debating that one. If I go into Goodwill soon and find one, I’ll leave this one here. I can’t see paying full price for one right now. Of course, it’ll all depend on whether I have a place to move into. I am entirely prepared to go the extended-stay route again if I have to. As long as when I leave here it is to go somewhere with a fridge, fine, I’ll get the pitcher. If it’s back into the car, that’ll be different.

I’m half tempted to call Dad just to see if he invites me back home. If I trusted my car to make the trip again, I’d be leaning more in that direction. But, here we are. Oh well.

—–
*He didn’t really, in my opinion. There were signs all along that he wasn’t where he wanted to be but was making the best of the situation. The thing that fucked with my head was he continued telling me it was what he wanted and where he wanted to be. But it was all bullshit, as usual with him. Two years ago was him showing his true colors at last. It just was such a major change from what he told me was going on that it looked like he’d gone wacko.

I was today years old when I found out the theme for the Austin Powers films was written by Quincy Jones.

I thought, “This needs a flash mob,” and YouTube obligingly served one up for me but unfortunately it wasn’t dancers, it was just musicians. It was still incredibly fucking cool, but they took a while gathering all the musicians together, starting with a single drummer and then adding more musicians pretty much one at a time but not really starting the song for several minutes, just the drumming and a horn or two, and it felt a lot like having sex with a new guy who doesn’t know what he’s doing at your controls yet and you take a whole fucking hour for something that shouldn’t have taken longer than ten minutes and you JUST KNOW he’s gonna get you there ANY SECOND NOW but… NO. ARGH. So I won’t share that here. You can go find it if you want to see it.

But seriously, someone should do a combo band and dancer flash mob of this. In costume, if possible. Screaming ladies an’ all. That would be incredible. Just about as good as doing a “Thriller” zombie dance.

Bonus if they can find a cop who’ll do cartwheels.

Dad’s been moved off ICU and has his own room. I’ve got the room number in a message from Carrie. I still don’t know for sure if I will call before he’s discharged, but I’m leaning hard towards “no.” Doug seems willing to give me updates and once in a while, Carrie does too. I’m good. If Dad had a track record of not being a dick about my shortcomings, it would be one thing, but nah. He doesn’t get to lecture me about anything after scaring me like that. Besides, I’m such a bad kid I might drive him straight back to drinking…

…And that’s another thing. There’s a strong possibility he’ll go home soon. He will go straight back to the bottle, and to lying to everyone about it. Bet me.

It’s weird, because in general I don’t mind people drinking. I suppose it depends on the person and what sort of drunk they are, and if they drink too much then I might worry about their health but in this particular case, his drinking and Reba’s drinking were instrumental in my childhood misery. So while I don’t give him shit about it, yeah, I realize I’m judgmental. I also understand how hard it is to quit something like that (I mean, look at me and carbs), but it being difficult for him to quit doesn’t make it any easier for me to deal with it.

Although, come to think of it, he’s meaner when he hasn’t been.

And come to think of that, my choosing not to call him is probably wise, then.

Moving on now.

Okay. Tomorrow. 10am. We’ll see what we will see. I need to check the trip duration so I know what to set my alarm for, but at least I showered already. OMG! An evening shower! I can’t remember the last time I did that. I’d been avoiding them here because the idea of taking a shower in that dark bathroom gives me the creeps. Lost count of how many times I’ve found spiders in there. AND YET, no light from outside gets in there when I’ve got the door closed, so it’s exactly as dark in the daytime as it is at night. Make it make sense. If my brain could make it make sense, though, I wouldn’t be in this mess.

I think I might finally be moving in the direction of going back more website-based. Kind of like it.

As to the other thing I vagueblogged about yesterday… Nah. I’ll keep going with it, and him. He can just be a pleasant distraction. I know it’ll never be anything else. At least in this case I know and I don’t have to wonder. Dawn wasn’t exactly right about that. Nor was I, with my original assumption about my motivation. I’m not being like this because it’s “safer,” or not only because of that. I’m being like this because for once I know what’s going on. No one’s lying to me; the man’s not even speaking to me. (He could. But he won’t.) Even with the not knowing his marital status, that’s in the public interest to know but it doesn’t mean you have to know in every single circumstance. He might be said to actually owe me that information if we knew one another in person and there were any chance whatsoever of dating — or, hell, just fucking. Other than that? Doesn’t matter. So I knew exactly the amount of info I needed to know about him. That’s nice, for a change. I wonder what that’s like with a man I actually know, but I doubt I’ll find out at this late date.

In other news, I think my brain is threatening creativity at me now. It is not unwelcome.

Okay. Bed. Big day tomorrow. Potentially.

Dad was sitting up in bed and eating breakfast this morning. Carrie got to call the ICU while he was still there, and whoever answered the phone acted as go-between. Carrie asked how he was, and he said he was fine. So he’s talking too.

Later in the day he got moved to a regular room. I’ve got the room number but don’t know if I will contact him. I’m not feeling particularly conflicted about it but I’m also not quite jaded enough yet to not worry at all about how other people will respond to whatever decisions I make in that regard. I’m MOSTLY not worried, but I’m not all the way there, if that makes any sense. But I also know that once my parents are gone my last ties to that area of the world will be utterly gone. I even, as much as I like her, get the sense that Carrie only tolerates me to be polite. I was telling her that with my daughter gone I’m really alone here now and she was like “get out there and meet people!” like I’d just said I’d run out of ice cream and all I have to do is go buy some more. A Canadian political activist who is a Facebook friend pointed out the other day, addressing his own personal situation, that you cannot make new old friends. That’s what I actually need, my old friends, but apparently my taste in friends over the course of my life has been rivaled only by my taste in men. I’m surprised none of this has ever occurred to Carrie, that my situation might be undesirable for particular reasons which cannot now be repaired. But I also get the sense she doesn’t care. I’m not going to ask. Once the parents are gone that’ll be it. I don’t even have my grandparents’ house to go take refuge in anymore. Mom sold that and I will not now be inheriting it.

Probably just as well. The only thing that appealed to me about the place was my people, and my people have got no use for me. The ones who liked me are now all dead.

Rain today. Patchy-to-drizzly, mainly. It’s been a dry year but frankly, I could do with it being dry a bit longer so I can see if I can get this month sorted without having to fear for my life after sunset; rain after dark with everyone’s bright-ass headlights means I lose visibility for seconds at a time. But either I will get the $1000 sorted or I will get a room sorted. I’m good either way. I still have not heard from Molly, my Salvation Army caseworker, so if Elizabeth ends up calling her or emailing her to ask about things, I guess that will light a fire under Molly’s ass, won’t it. (And all I asked was whether I am still in the program. I think that is a reasonable question to ask, wouldn’t you agree? That is what was not answered. Nice.) But I would like to get the rent if at all possible. That way if Elizabeth persists in not giving me documentation of what I owe on electricity, she’s got the full $1000 from the deposit to make up for it. If she has to use it to cover the last month’s rent instead, that’s not good for her. It won’t matter to me either way, after the way this summer has gone. I want to do right by her, but if I can’t, I can’t. She’s either dragged her feet with or outright neglected my things she needed to get done. She’s over-promised and under-delivered. I think I’ve done pretty damned well by comparison, considering.

I was mistaken when I thought they took Pat out of here to go to a hospice center. I knew a lot of times hospice is at home, and turns out his is too. I can’t say I’m surprised. He and Elizabeth built their own little paradise here and I could see him not wanting to leave it. I know that’s taking up a lot of Elizabeth’s mental real estate. It doesn’t change the way things are on my end. Must make a mental note to never try to rescue anybody when I am in the middle of a crisis. It’s not fair to them or to me.

In a distantly related vein, I am feeling a sea change (oh, here we go being corny) in regards to certain other things. Sort of where I’m not quite ready to let go yet but am seriously questioning what the point is. I’m not unsafe or anything — don’t get the wrong idea. This isn’t about me, this is about, erm, a certain object of focus. (By “object” I mean as in subject-verb-object, not that he is actually a thing.) For four years now I have had this sort of secret hope ongoing where I wanted to make certain things happen in order to put myself in the way of other things being more likely to happen. I think the only reason I still hang on to that is it’s a nice harmless little form of escapism that makes life more tolerable. But maybe it is also siphoning away mental energy I need to get my shit sorted. Also, for all the self-deprecating humor I indulge in, I really have a higher opinion of myself than was ever warranted. I’m afraid my perspective was skewed by living through a time in which there were too many men available per population of women and so the men would take nearly any pussy offered, available, or just randomly walking past minding its own business. It made me think I was more attractive or interesting than I actually was. Then there was Matt and his bullshit and that only extended the delusion. He didn’t mean it, of course. I was his consolation prize since his own wife wasn’t interested enough in him. (Wait til Crys finds out she is a hybrid consolation prize and escape hatch. Again. This is not the first time.) I started cluing in to just how little I had to offer as I navigated Men Trying To Date Through Social Media over a span of a decade or so. It’s pretty much a done deal now. So what I thought I was doing trying to put myself in the way of getting someone else’s attention, I really do not know. It’s pointless.

I can’t really go into much more detail than that, or more accurately won’t because I’m embarrassed enough already. Or whatever passes for “embarrassed” when one is almost constantly emotionally numb except for occasional bouts of rage, anyway. But yeah. Thinky-thoughts.

I should just cobble together a life plan, and then go for it. It doesn’t matter anymore what it is, as long as I go with something. If I keep hemming and hawing trying to get it Just Right, I’ll be ninety and dead and it’ll be too late. And life goes ever faster the older I get. Och, ye’re a long time deid.

It is testimony to the fact my father has been drinking for literally all of my life and so it’s a bit “fish not being able to see the water it’s in” when I got the latest news from Doug today and it seems Dad is going into involuntary alcohol detox and I was actually not expecting that. Hadn’t even thought about it.

The way my brother prefaced it was “well, I know now Dad was lying to me” because apparently Dad told him he wasn’t drinking more than a bottle’s worth of whiskey (he favors Early Times Kentucky bourbon… mixed with Coca-Cola, and it is nasty that way) in a month. I suppose it depends on how one defines “bottle,” and I just looked it up and I’m pretty sure the sizes I saw available at the stores we frequented when I stayed with him two years ago were the 750 mL and the 1 L, and of course 750 mL is three-quarters of a liter. It’s not half. So even if he had been getting the 750 every fucking week when we’d shop — even if he’d been getting it every other week — if he’d meant the one-liter when he told Doug “one bottle,” the amounts I saw added up to THREE liters if bought weekly, and 1.5 if every other week. So, yeah. Lying through his fucking teeth.

He’s lied about it for years. I even caught him lying to Carrie, and he adores Carrie. The woman has just enough class that she probably knew he was lying but elected to be diplomatic about it. But it’s south Louisiana. Between her and me we probably know enough alcoholics down there to start a new Acadia Parish branch of Alcoholics Anonymous. We both know how it goes. I will be stunned if I’m wrong about her. Anyway, the lying was bad enough when it was just about drinking. Then he kept drinking and kept lying when he went diabetic and then kept right on going when he began his kidney failure process (it will progress if you can’t stop whatever’s causing the failure, until one day you need transplant or dialysis), and by that point it was is there something you want to tell us, Mister Doug (my brother’s named after my dad), because that sure looks like slow suicide to us.

I was probably the only one he never tried to bullshit about his drinking because I was one of very few who never gave him shit about it. (Or questioned him or admonished him in general. I wouldn’t say Carrie gave him shit about it, but she said things from time to time.) I do not say that out of pride. I’m not ashamed of it, either. He knows he drinks too much. He has known he drinks too much since he was seventeen. If telling him he drinks too much would have helped, the man’s going to be seventy-two next month if he lives that long. Either he’s stupid or he doesn’t care. He got all the way to senior chief petty officer in the Navy. Man’s not stupid. Can’t cure lack of caring. That’s on him. All you do with someone in a bind like that when you fuss at them is activate their persecution complex and then they dig in their heels, no matter how stupid it looks because they know that you’re right and that they’re hurting themselves.

Well, actually, he might have lied to me, come to think of it. I don’t know, I can’t remember anything specific, but I know at one point it was not out where people could see it, and the problem with lying to someone who cleans your house is eventually they’re going to find the stash. But I want to say he’s only done the big production number of “I have quit drinking” maybe once or twice to me in my near-half-century of life. Because again, I don’t make a big deal out of it.

Only experience is going to teach people like my father, if anything will at all. Shame he wasn’t conscious for this object lesson. They had to restrain him when he went into DTs.

I actually kind of wonder if his setback yesterday was an early warning sign of it. Would actually be good news if I’m right, because if he can get all that out of his system without up and dying, he might actually wake up afterwards.

He won’t like himself when he does, and he’ll feel like shit. But we’ll see.

(I don’t actually think he will come out of this, but nothing ever seems to go the way I think it will go. In this case, I’ll be very happy to be wrong.)

The day wasn’t as good as I’d have liked. That was mostly on me. After making about sixty bucks, I had to pee, and I was close to home and it was either pee at home or go to Meijer, and Meijer’s restroom is usually disgusting. Okay, that’s a strong word — Unpleasant. It’s an old store, it needs renovation, it’s not run well, no one’s paid enough (I think their starting rate is UP TO $13 an hour — department-store retail is usually part-time when you’re starting, too), and it shows. I thought, fuck it. It’s nice that I can just run home. So on the way there, I thought, you know what? I’m tired of this shit, and so I decided to just call it a day. But hey, sixty-something wasn’t terrible. I’d feel better about it if (1) I had done more this month already and (2) I weren’t pretty sure I’ll be starting work next week, and I’m not sure when I’ll get paid. It’s supposed to be weekly, but being a new employee will mean pay will be delayed at least a week. I didn’t see whether they have same-day pay, either. But Quantum didn’t advertise having it, so that’s no metric. But hey. Could be that whole thing will fall through. I don’t know.

I need to start rebuilding my life and it’s hard to know where to begin when you’re stressed out, just surviving, and every possible route to get out of your situation looks like descending into hell. And when you don’t trust anyone anymore. That too. I try to think about what I want my life to look like and every time I contemplate things I realize that several of the elements involved require that other people notice I exist, are not unhappy that I exist, are willing to engage with me and whatever I’m offering or wanting to do, and so on. Tall order, I suppose.

I will not even go near the dating-again thing. Dead end. To be fair, fucking would likely be very painful at this point. I just have a feeling. And that’s one more thing I need to address and can’t. But I’d want more than that anyway and when do I ever get it? I don’t. I get idiots who would rather spend money than talk with me. Or listen to me. Or actually hear what I have to say. I’m over it.

Maybe I’ll just start a plant collection. I already have three.

Started unusually early with the driving and got over $100 today. That’s more like it, though I won’t be able to save all of that aside. Need food, need gas. Same old grind.

On the way back from Delaware(!), I nabbed a Tanuki run that was going down into Dublin just because it was seven more bucks and why not. Doug calls me not long after. I think, oh shit, and I was just north of Seldom Seen when that came in so I stopped at that Sheetz and canceled the Tanuki run. Doug was calm but quavery and quite unhappy. Dad was this close to going into a normal hospital room earlier today, and they took their eyes off him for like two seconds while they were processing all that and they turned back around and his eyes were rolling up in his head and then he was unresponsive. He’s still with us, but we don’t know how much of him is still with us or if he will wake up. Aunt Matilda is freaking out and Doug’s been the one talking with her, so he got to be the scapegoat.

See, he was supposed to go visit Dad with his kids back in June. His youngest has a different mother than his two older ones, who are from his former (and only) marriage. Emma, the youngest, was staying with her mom and then her mom decided to keep her an extra day… which happened to be the day Emma and Doug were supposed to leave for Louisiana. Doug had bought tickets for everyone to go, so for four people and two originating in Oregon and two others from Tennessee. Lots of money on the line. I think he’d already had to reschedule the trip once, so having to cancel again meant he lost all that money. He had seriously considered going anyway, without Emma, but Emma already knew the trip was planned and wouldn’t have understood.

Well, apparently Dad told Matilda about the cancellation but we’re not sure he told her why it happened. So Matilda threw that back in Doug’s face today. (Possibly again. I want to say she jumped his shit about it the day Dad had the seizure, too.) She’s not the only one jumping his shit; his two older kids, who aren’t kids anymore (Lexi, the younger one, is 23 this year!), are now not speaking to him again over the failed trip. He’s not having a good time this year at all.

I understand being aggravated with him. He’s been a flake all his life and he abused me when we were kids, and I don’t know what he got up to in his relationships and it could be he was an ass then too (though Moriah, his ex-wife, gave as good as she got; I was staying with them when they had one of their fights and she was raising her voice and being aggressive right along with him, and then her mother called and here come the waterworks. I couldn’t believe it — some kind of Jekyll and Hyde thing). But anyone can have bad luck, and just because you’re a flake or you do something wrong doesn’t mean someone else can’t be a flake or wrong you too. It doesn’t seem to be in human nature to take matters on a case-by-case basis but honestly, I think we’d be a lot happier if we learned how.

So anyway he’s beating himself up a lot. He’s also in therapy, has been for years, and he said he had a breakthrough with that recently where his therapist said to him, “You know you and your sister were abandoned children, right?” I thought that was a bit harsh to be aimed at Dad, who was in the military and couldn’t choose to be home more, but Doug pointed out that when he went to live with our father after his parents split, Dad was mostly gone because he worked for the oil industry or related industries that required him to be gone something like two or three weeks for every week home. It’s true that he didn’t have to do that. He was retired from the Navy and got a monthly check and it would have gone a lot farther in south Louisiana back then, so he wouldn’t have had to maximize any work wages; also, as a custodial parent and Doug still a minor, he could have pressed for child support had he wished. Only problem with that was the divorce wasn’t final until 1998, when Doug turned twenty, but Dad could have set that ball rolling too. Nah, he’d rather go away for weeks at a time with a(n at the time) minor child at home. So Doug got abandoned worse than I did, if that’s possible. I mean, we both got left to our own devices and not properly parented lots when the family was still “intact” (if you can call your dad’s second marriage an “intact family” — but from Doug’s point of view it would have seemed that way) as it was. So, us being a mess was probably always going to happen. But of course somehow when you hit the magical age of 18 your brain is supposed to reset and make you behave exactly as if you had been properly parented the prior 18 years. And of course if it doesn’t and you’re disordered because of how your childhood shaped you and other people react to you weirdly because you’re not following their script, that’s your fault too and you should just get over it.

Well, I’m over it, but maybe not the way everyone hoped. This is what you do when one of your own is faltering, folks. Have fun living with yourselves. I shan’t be bothering.

I haven’t asked Doug whether he’s told Thea about Dad. I sent Thea a message about the situation a couple days ago through one of her art accounts on Instagram, but she hasn’t updated that in a long time and she may have abandoned it. The way she’s behaved thus far, anyway, like as not even if she got the message she wouldn’t reply. When your social-worker best friend observes that your child has written you off and she’s never even met the kid, that’s saying something. Dawn’s on her main Instagram, too. We both theorized that Thea overlooked her, but Thea is not stupid (ignorant about some things, but still a pretty sharp young person). My personal theory, one I haven’t suggested to Dawn, is that Thea knows she’s there and this is a loophole for Thea’s “no contact” thing. This way I can still get news sometimes without Thea telling me directly. Thea’s account has not blocked me, either (I thought for a while that she had, but apparently not), so if she reads Dawn’s posts then sometimes she sees me comment, and she can come look at me too. It’s a whole potential thing. Sooooo… Dawn has shown she will not act as a go-between, and Dawn never told me they actually moved to Colorado, so unless Thea only told Doug that by direct message and hasn’t mentioned it on her Instagram openly, Dawn’s known all this time. So I’m thinking that at some point Thea said some stupid fucking thing about Crys being her mother now. Bet me. And Dawn saw it and didn’t want to upset me or get personally involved in the drama. It would be weird for Dawn to just randomly decide my kid has written me off with no evidence to back it up. Her go-to would be “well, there’s a lot of anger between you and she probably just feels better not talking with you right now.” That would be the usual social-worker explanation. Something in that vein. If she’s saying “written off,” she knows something.

I’m not angry at her about it. Given what happens when people I’ve known try to be go-betweens, how much shit gets lost in translation or misinterpreted or whatever, I would just as soon she not stick her nose in. There is nothing I can do in any case. It’s not like I can pull up stakes, go to Colorado, and kick Crys’s ass. Much as I might like to. I can’t fight worth a fuck anyway. So I’d rather Dawn stayed neutral even if it means I miss important information. And whatever the fuck Crys gets up to in order to mess with my kid’s head — before I had even left Ohio two years ago, she had suggested to Matt that she talk with Thea about knowing what it’s like to be abandoned by your mother, and I wanted to kick her ass then because she was a BIG reason I was leaving — my kid isn’t really a kid anymore, it’s not going to stick as hard, and at some point the spell will break. I don’t know what the breaking point will be, but my kid has already shown she doesn’t take kindly to being (or perceiving that she is being) fucked with. Age 25, in a few more years, her brain fully matures. With enough life experience and maybe therapy (if they stop pandering to her bullshit), she might start wising up. It will not be pretty when that happens. Pass the popcorn.

That’ll mean, of course, that she’ll still have reasons to be pissed off at me, but the gender thing and the my leaving thing will not be among them. And she won’t be seeing Crys and Matt as the Good Guys™ anymore, either. Fine by me.

It hit me sometime yesterday that everything feels different knowing they’re gone. I had spent two years afraid of running into her and upsetting her, or of having her be nasty to me openly. I wasn’t sure what I would say if I ran into Mr. or Mrs. Asshole, either. The anxiety around these possibilities was so powerful that I deliberately avoided the segment of major road they lived on; this situation has even affected my delivery-driver patterns all this time. Now? Now I feel like I could go anywhere or do anything around here. It’s like this great festering boil was lanced and shit’s starting to heal.

It’s terrible feeling that way about your kid. You cannot know how awful it was being in that house not being able to open my mouth because the most innocuous phrasing could send my child into a tailspin, and no one would run interference for me. Everyone was my enemy. My whole life was a fucking minefield. It was sickening. Literally sickening: I felt physically ill and suffered frequent bouts of insomnia for something like a year before I left and it got much worse in the final two or three months. They would mock me behind my back. “Mom’s stress-cleaning again,” because I had been awake all night and was cleaning in order to keep myself awake so I could reset my circadian clock. Oh ha ha, Mom’s stress-cleaning. Yeah. Your fucking mess because you’d rather spend all your time telling your fucking deviantART friends what a bigot you’ve got for a mom than picking up your fucking room. Brat. And your dad with his little online love affair that he had planned to spring on me all unawares had I not caught on to his weird behavior and called him out early. He would have brought that bitch right through the door, “I got married, here’s my wife.” He would have. I barely escaped with my sanity. I was cleaning his fucking neglect-messes too.

Well rid. I want a relationship with my daughter again one day, but that graying rotten haggis on legs can get run over by a bus right fucking now. I’m game.

You will notice I did not wish for his wife to get hit by that bus. I want her to watch, and then I want her to know what it’s like to lose everything. Enjoy.

You want to know what’s sad? I had a few Possibles over the years that I sort of pursued. I did. And I didn’t talk with him about them. The reason I didn’t talk with him about them was I didn’t know how things were going to go and I didn’t want to get him riled up over nothing. The one time I thought it was going somewhere because Craig was trolling me, though, I did tell Matt about that. Out and out wrote him a long email about it. Said I wanted to marry the guy and everything. I don’t know why Matt goes around acting like I have double standards about this. Wait, yes I do know. Same reason he’s had all along. He can’t be the good guy if he tells everyone how it actually was, so he has to make shit up.

The thing is, I don’t care about being the good guy. What angers me is that everyone made a bad guy into a good guy and they’re punishing me for basically nothing. I don’t have to be the good guy, but I’m NOT the fucking monster. I should have had real help the first time he went bad on me like this, and not from my fucking ex-mother-in-law, either. I thought I had friends. Where the fuck were they? Feeling sorry for people who had an easy out of the situation and who, let’s be frank, created the fucking situation in the first place. I was FINE in that stupid relationship until they started treating me like the fucking Handmaid. Do they even comprehend how fucking gross they are? Will they ever understand how fucking wrong they went where I was concerned? Nah. That’s why we had a problem at all. You can’t fix stupid. Or hateful, either.

I have a theory — here we go again with my theories — because when I got involved with Matt, he was still married to Vivien and they had been trying to have a baby. First weekend he and I met in person I had told him, “I want a baby.” I missed my son like crazy and I wanted a second child anyhow. So what if — here goes my theory — Matt thought about knocking me up, then taking the baby away and having Viv adopt it? The way he’s behaved all along it’s like he hated my guts but wanted to manipulate me — and yes, men will get boners for women they hate, and have all sorts of sexyfuntimes with them. It sounds incredibly paranoid, but it fits the pattern because otherwise there was a lot of shit he did and said that made no sense whatsoever. It would have been easy to take the baby, too. Matt could have shown I had lost one child to grandparent adoption already and that I was too poor to raise another one. With a halfway decent lawyer he could have fucking killed me. Bet me. The way he flitted off to Colorado with my daughter without so much as a by-your-leave fits the pattern too.

So, yeah. Whatever he says to anyone ever about how he supposedly felt about me, I haven’t bought it in years and I never will again. He fucked up big time.

He also doesn’t care, so I suppose I can consider that chapter of my life closed. If Thea comes back to me in any sense, great. But I also need to prepare for the possibility that she won’t.

…

I was also going to mention I have a job interview of sorts coming up Monday. It’s one of those temp agencies that places in distribution centers and we’ve got the holiday season coming up. I haven’t burnt this particular bridge yet. The “interview” will probably be pretty much them figuring out where to put me. If I told you the name of the corporation owning the distribution center you would recognize it immediately. It’s New Albany again. It should be fairly close to I-270 or to Dublin-Granville Road, so I’m going to look into that one apartment community I’ve been looking into in that area and if they’re a go, fantastic and if not, I can still do that other one in north Clintonville as long as they’ve got a unit available. If both of those fall through, there’s also an extended-stay hotel in New Albany in the same general area. I’ll be okay.

I wanted to do Major Department Store near Sawmill and Bethel, but they may only have part-time hours. If things look bleak I’ll try anyway, but I want to see how this goes first. It won’t be the $19 or $20 an hour that some DCs pay, but it’ll be pretty good and the apartment communities I am looking at have offerings for under $700 a month. Doable.

Ooh. I still need to look into the utilities situation. Not here. The situation with AEP and Columbia Gas from 2009. If there is no situation, fine. If there is a situation, I need to find out how to fix that situation. I would probably be a lot better off facing that drama than chewing my own foot off about things I can’t change at all.

There won’t even be a proper funeral for my dad, mind you. He’s donating his body to science, then they’ll cremate whatever’s left and the Navy will dump it at sea.

Abandoned again. Moving on now, I suppose.

I’ve taken another day off because after yesterday’s fail parade, I was pretty keyed up and couldn’t sleep. Or I’d start falling asleep and then get angry and wake back up. Or a little of both. I don’t really know. Point is, I woke up tired. If I had to drive to a workplace and then stay there working for eight hours like this, I would do it, but having to drive around TO work is another matter.

Plus there were a lot of people on the lot today and I just didn’t feel like trying to maneuver through all that. I actually put off going out and getting food (I am not certain of the safety of what’s left in my fridge and freezer after yesterday’s shenanigans) just because I didn’t want to deal with them. Even in passing.

I really don’t know if I’m going to make the full $1000 this month. It’s the 11th already and I’ve barely got anything. That’s somewhat my fault, a little bit not (several factors went into this situation), at least as far as my post-employment life is concerned. Obviously, the quitting the job was 100% my fault. Anyway. I’m working on securing employment but we’ll just have to see how things go. A couple things I thought were leads are actually not that great. I do see a couple other things that are kind of in line with what I had in mind, though. They’ve got weekly pay so maybe I still have a chance.

(I even discovered I have options for stopping my stupid period and that I’ll be able to enact either of two of them without setting foot in a doctor’s office if it comes down to that. If it even works at my weight, but it should at least quiet things down a lot. I don’t care if I still have a period if it happens to just get a lot lighter instead of stopping. That’s still a win.)

But if stuff doesn’t work out then it doesn’t work out. I already don’t trust Elizabeth’s claim that she’d be a reference for me with a future landlord. I could barely get her to deal with the paperwork Molly sent her. For all I know, she could be worse after Pat dies. I understand why, but my understanding won’t improve the situation one bit. That’s pretty much a dead end. I will make plans as best I can and try to mitigate any damage — I don’t need to lose something important again because I had to hightail it out of here before she locks my shit down. Pretty sad that I have to think like that but that’s my life anymore.

I did email Molly today to ask if I was still in the program. I literally have not heard from her since July and that by text message. Last email from her was June. I remember signing a document that stated I have to participate in the rehousing program in order to stay in the program, but no one told me what that meant and I’ve had zero feedback on whether I’m properly participating since. If I’m still in it I’ll update her on what’s happening. If I’m not, at least I’ll know I’m not. If she ever answers — and hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if she doesn’t. It would be par for the course. The Salvation Army did a lot for me and I’ll never say otherwise, but they treated me pretty shabbily in some ways too. Which seems to be the story of my fucking life, and I wish I knew why.

I have not tried to contact anyone to ask about Dad. I went to him two years ago with my heart broken and not sure where to turn next and all I got was lectures. Everyone wants me to be this soft cuddly lovable comforting presence and what the fuck, I never had that. Closest I got was Matt and he was fucking lying to my fucking face. I don’t know how I survived childhood, much less anything else. Life’s hard, huh? Have fun experiencing your own theories, old man. Amazingly, with as big of an asshole as he often is, he still has people there for him. I’ll never have that again — and I only ever had it because I was a kid and it was kind of mandatory. I don’t have it now. Just games and bullshit and everyone going “what’s in it for me”. I’VE GOT NOTHING. I’M FUCKING TAPPED. EXPLOIT SOMEONE ELSE.

Okay. I need to see if I can be productive at all today. It won’t be driving, but I’m kind of dancing around something and I need to do more of it. Later.

LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY FUCKING DAY

So. Turns out yesterday my landlady had tried to get a hold of me (I think it was yesterday…) because she wanted to explain why the dogs would be barking a lot. She’d had them in the garage because there were lots of people over because… Pat went into hospice. I had wondered if he was going to do at-home hospice or facility hospice but had been surprised he wasn’t there already (unless it was at-home, in which case never mind). But I guess they didn’t have things set up for at-home hospice and then he needed the ambulance again recently — I already told you about that. And a lot of this is me filling in blanks because I just know the bare facts that there was an ambulance here the other day and now Pat’s in hospice. But I had been all paranoid about what she wanted to say to me, basically for nothing.

But today the power was out in my apartment. It wasn’t out in the entire building because we still had water (we’re on a well system) and also hot water, and it wasn’t out on the entire lot for similar reasons, also one of the wifi routers was still up and running. I spent most of the day angry, convinced she’d shut off my power even though she never gave me the electric bill nor even told me the amount (though I still would have wanted to see the bill). It was a bad day. I spent most of it gone because I couldn’t get anything done here anyway; I showered in the dark as it was.

First I went to Meijer and got a bottle of Seafoam, two bottles of motor oil, and a few other bits and bobs. The car had been sounding a little bad. I feel like it sounds better now (I only used one bottle of the motor oil, but I have one in reserve just in case), but that could just be wishful thinking. I don’t think it’s wishful thinking, but I’m probably wrong. I also had to top up the tires because the temp’s been dropped long enough outside that basically the air in them shrank. I hate this time of year. ANYWAY…

Then I went to IHOP. I had been meaning to go and I just wanted some fucking breakfast and a nice sit-down. The prices are pretty good. The only fly in the ointment was literal (fruit) flies; I got the strawberry-banana pancakes to go with my meal (I had eggs and the whole bit) and I had this sinking feeling they had accompanied the fruit. I didn’t see any obvious bugs in my pancakes and I decided not to make a big deal out of it. I feel like I can’t make a big deal out of anything. Everyone thinks I’m a fucking monster and it ruins everything. I also can’t say things nicely because people go “oh look, a sucker” and don’t listen to me. I don’t know how I deal with all that. There’s no way to go with it to actually get the problem solved. People wonder why I’m angry, but it’s been like that all along. Would you be happy? You know you wouldn’t. Fuck off.

(If Matt has told you he was scared of me, he wasn’t fucking scared of me, he just hated me and liked to see me hopeless. Wouldn’t listen if I was nice, stonewalled me if I got pissed off. That’s who you picked as your friend, morons. Enjoy.)

After that I went to the library, which wasn’t much farther up the road. I wanted to make jewelry but something happened when I got there that completely threw me off my feed.

Brother was trying to get hold of me. I texted back and forth with him but he asked for a phone call, so we chatted. My dad has had a brain bleed. It first manifested as a seizure in Carrie’s SUV when she was taking him to a doctor’s appointment. (He hasn’t had a license in years.) She took him to American Legion in Jennings where they diagnosed the bleed and then he got sent to Lake Charles. He’s supposed to have surgery tomorrow. She gave me the general number to the hospital but I doubt I’d have much of a conversation with him if at all, and I don’t want to hear it. I know. I’m an asshole. But he’s just had a brain event and he was an asshole himself before then. Pass. If he comes out of surgery okay, we’ll see.

The other thing I learned from Doug is that he’s in touch with Thea. They talk on Instagram, apparently. Doug is calling her by her ridiculous* transname “Quill” but says he doesn’t understand what all else is going on. I’ll write to him at some point and give my side of it. He at least seems willing to listen. I am fine with him talking with her. He’s her uncle, for fuck’s sake, and he’s in fucking Oregon and usually too broke to travel and she’s still living with her dad. Whatever. And she ought to be in touch with someone from my side of the family, considering.

The other OTHER thing I learned from Doug is that she really is in Colorado. I don’t know when this happened, but I had been keeping half an eye on the Zillow thing for their house here and had seen no signs that it had recently been sold. Zillow has listings whether something is for sale or not, far as I can tell, so that in itself was no indication. But yes, the house was sold last month. And wouldn’t you know it, the piece of shit renovated it to sell it. Couldn’t make it nice while we were living in it, no. My one consolation was that the assessed value dropped by one-quarter this year, probably because the assessor actually got a look inside [shudder], and serves the asshole right. I’m betting he took a loss. My only question at this point is why Colorado. Crys is homesick for California. Completely different state. But, that’s their thing. I’ll probably never know. After all, he could not be bothered to tell me they were leaving. I will probably keel over in shock if I ever hear from him again.

Or tell him to go fuck himself.

And it’s about equal likelihood either way.

I did finally finish two stretch bracelets and then got McDonald’s in case the power was not back on (I would have gotten groceries instead had it been on and I’d known it) and then came back here. Power still wasn’t on but there was this huge-ass pickup truck in the parking lot (there is a small parking lot) and some guy I didn’t recognize. As I was parking, he went up toward the chicken coop with a woman I also didn’t recognize and they were carrying what looked like a big black box and maybe some other things. I went inside, puttered around a bit…

BEEEEEP

…and the power came back on. So that’s what they were doing.

So, whatever had been going on, Elizabeth hadn’t known about it because undoubtedly she was at hospice with Pat. I should have said something when we texted, but as I didn’t know whether she had done it on purpose, I didn’t want to potentially start an argument or fight. But now it’s all sorted, so whatever.

I wish the rest of my life were, but one day at a time, I guess.

—–
*I don’t actually think it is all that ridiculous, upon further reflection. It’s fine, and if she’d just wanted to change her name to change her name, and had come up with some other reason than “I’m not Grandma Althea” — what the fuck? — then I probably would have been okay with it. But it was like this big repudiation of her entire childhood and her parents, especially me. No. I’m not going to simp for that. She can deal.

And while we’re on the subject. How come these gender assholes can’t pick actually growing the fuck up as a way of distancing themselves from childhood? Because that’s not at all what they’re doing.

And finally: Yes, I did call my daughter an asshole. She is a great big stinky one. That’s her choice. I will be happy to stop seeing her as one when she stops being one.

I did not say I wasn’t one. But she definitely is one. The end.